A year ago, Obama was the golden child of American politics. Today, his temples greying, his approval ratings sharply down, Obama is at the centre of an anti-establishment storm that threatens to render impossible the notion of effective, consistent governance. Impatient for change and increasingly pessimistic about their long-term economic prospects, voters are cannoning from conservative to liberal to conservative candidates at ever greater speed.

Attempting to manage the fallout from the 2008 financial collapse, Obama is arousing the wrath of a vocal conservative movement, up in arms at his willingness to expand the national debt in order to float the economy. At the same time, his progressive "base" is furious at his apparent moderation, wanting more radical healthcare reforms, more state regulation of the banks and more money spent on job creation programmes. One part of his 2008 electoral coalition believes he's doing far too much; the other part believes he's doing far too little. Left in the middle, with increasingly little margin for error, is Barack Obama, a man who has built a career out of striving for consensus.

As year two of the Obama presidency unfolds, the president will have to navigate a new political reality: the 2008 coalition of interests that produced an electoral college landslide has been seriously damaged. Obama will, therefore, have to chart a new, and narrower, path to victory in 2012. He will have to push aggressively for job-creation programmes, especially for the devastated industrial mid-west, home to a host of key swing states. He will have to creatively use stimulus money to refloat near-bankrupt state governments, from New York to California to Hawaii, in order to prevent a rollback of vital state-level public services of a magnitude never before seen in the country. And he will have to find ways to get Americans to feel emotionally vested in universal healthcare and other social reforms.

If in 2008 Obama was a redux of John Kennedy – the charismatic young man who made people feel good even while he remained somewhat vague regarding specific policies – he will have to morph into Franklin Roosevelt in 2010. When the financial system collapsed in 1929, Herbert Hoover was at the beginning of his tenure: for the remaining years of his presidency, unemployment soared and living standards collapsed. By the time Roosevelt was elected, the fallout from the Wall Street crash was indelibly associated with Hoover, allowing FDR to put in place new policies to rebuild the country, despite stubbornly high unemployment and poverty rates throughout his presidency.

This time around the financial collapse occurred in the waning weeks of the Bush presidency; Obama came into office just as the unemployment catastrophe began to unfold. It was inevitable both that unemployment would soar in the first months of his presidency, and that the near-unanimous goodwill toward him would start to evaporate. He would come to be seen as a leader associated with ongoing economic crisis.

Because Obama has shown himself to be a startlingly good counter-puncher – as both Hillary Clinton and John McCain can testify – my guess is that in year two of his presidency he will find his stride again. Even though Massachusetts voters elected a Republican senator yesterday, thus depriving the Democrats of the ability to break Republican Senate filibusters, the Democrats still have a large Senate majority. Obama went the extra mile to seek consensus in Washington this past year. It didn't work; Republicans made a calculation that their best political interests were served by promoting partisanship in DC and the country as a whole by triggering governmental stalemate around huge issues such as healthcare reform.

As a result, Obama has been left with nothing to lose by positioning himself as a more partisan leader. Belatedly, his administration began castigating Republicans for absenting themselves from constructive negotiations around healthcare reform; they have started to sound, and act, angrier, around banking reform and the payment of bonuses to bankers; and in Massachusetts they pushed hard to portray the Democratic party's large, filibuster-proof majority as vital to a long-term, and wide-ranging, reform agenda. Obama the self-proclaimed healer, or great unifier, is being forced by circumstances to become a more partisan leader. He is being forced, in short, to act politically more like Franklin Roosevelt.

In year two, the administration will likely push forward with a healthcare overhaul, despite yesterday's setback in Massachusetts . To retain credibility, it doesn't really have a choice. It will push for reform of bank regulation structures, call for higher taxes on wealthy Americans – and probably punitive taxes on bank executives' bonuses – and articulate the need for another federal job-creation stimulus package. It will do so on the assumption the public will tolerate a stunningly high national deficit only if it produces a rapid pay-off vis-à-vis jobs. And that means finding a way to push unemployment considerably below the 10% line.

Will it work? Given the depth of the economic crisis, and the resultant rage among voters, there are no guarantees. But if they don't try, the presidency risks being fatally mauled in year two. Obama the counter-puncher, the man who has carried framed photos of Muhammad Ali from one office to the next throughout his career, is too tough and agile a politician to take a pounding on the ropes without fighting back.